Liverpool and Mersey-Cheshire have provided the template for a national change inside the Crown Prosecution Service, with a pilot first tested in the region now being rolled out across every CPS Area in England and Wales. Under the move, all domestic abuse victims will be offered a dedicated victim liaison officer from charge to trial. For a justice system often accused of going quiet when victims need answers most, that is a practical change rather than a slogan.

The announcement was marked in Liverpool, where Attorney General Ellie Reeves KC MP met JUSTICE North, local charities, campaigners and CPS staff who helped run the Mersey-Cheshire pilot. The setting mattered as much as the message: this is a national reform shaped by work outside Westminster. Reeves said trust in the justice system depends on victims feeling that it works for them wherever they live. In Liverpool, that point lands hard. Local services have spent years telling ministers that communication is not a minor administrative detail but one of the main reasons survivors lose faith in the process.

The CPS is making two strands of support permanent. Its Universal Service is meant to improve how all victims are updated, with more regular and clearer contact. Its Enhanced Service goes further for domestic abuse survivors, offering support from the point of charge through to trial and following the victim's preferred method of contact, whether by phone, email or post. That second step matters. Until now, this level of one-to-one contact was largely reserved for families bereaved by crime and victims of rape or serious sexual offences. Extending it to domestic abuse cases is an overdue recognition that survivors have too often been left to carry the stress of the system on their own.

The model has been tested since 2023 in Mersey-Cheshire and a small number of other areas, but local leaders are keen to point out that the North has not just hosted the pilot but helped prove it. Fiona Rutherford, chief executive of JUSTICE North, said the region's work showed how ideas developed here can shape the national debate. That is worth dwelling on. Too often, justice reform arrives in the North as something designed elsewhere and handed down. Here, Liverpool and Mersey-Cheshire have been part of writing the script, with JUSTICE North, hosted by Liverpool law firm Broudie Jackson Canter, pressing the case that regional experience should carry real weight when government decides how justice works.

Ayla Nasuh, chief executive of Merseyside Domestic Violence Service, used the meeting to make a harder point. Survivors, she said in substance, are still too often left repeating abuse, gathering evidence again and again, and waiting for meaningful action against the person causing the harm. A named liaison officer will not fix every weakness in the courts, the police or the wider support network. But campaigners say it could ease one of the most wearing parts of the process: being left in the dark, chasing updates and trying to decipher a system that can feel distant even when a case is moving.

The rollout sits inside the CPS Victim Transformation Programme, launched in 2022 after victims said they wanted clearer, quicker and more empathetic communication. It also fits with the government's wider pledge to halve violence against women and girls within a decade, alongside measures such as Raneem's Law and extra funding for pre-trial work in selected Crown Court areas, including Mersey-Cheshire. For the North, the bigger significance is this: a justice reform with national reach has been shaped in part by regional evidence, regional services and regional pressure. The real test now is not the ministerial visit or the rollout announcement, but whether women across Liverpool, Merseyside and beyond actually feel the system speaking to them, backing them and moving when it should.